Governor pushes ethic of public service at college

Robert Salladay and Kathleen Sullivan, OF THE EXAMINER STAFF

Published 4:00 am, Friday, April 9, 1999

1999-04-09 04:00:00 PDT CALIFORNIA -- SACRAMENTO - Building on a trend popular at many high schools, Gov. Davis wants to require that students in every public college in California perform community service as a condition of graduation.

"One of the ethics of the World War II generation was a sense of obligation to the future and an appreciation for what they inherited," Davis said Thursday during a news conference to mark his first 100 days in office. "That is being eroded."

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The governor said he was working out the details with college officials and his advisors, and had only started thinking about how long students would be required to serve and what they could do.

Volunteering in the community has been a mainstay of private and Catholic schools for years. Many public high schools picked up the trend after President Clinton made a big push early in his administration, but only a few public colleges in California, including CSU-Monterey Bay, require community service to graduate.

But mandating public service has created problems in some cases, including complaints that low-income students need paying jobs to survive while in school.

And a lack of guidance from the schools often means students become a burden rather than a help to charities and nonprofit agencies.

Some community groups have been unprepared for an influx of hundreds of students, some of whom are less than enthusiastic about being forced into service.

Ryan Neder, 19, a philosophy and religion major at San Francisco State, said he was required to perform 40 hours of community service every semester at his Catholic high school in Modesto.

He often resorted to mowing people's lawns rather than working in a convalescent hospital or a soup kitchen. The work would be listed as miscellaneous, he said.

Now, in college, Neder estimates he has about only 12 hours of free time each week with all his classes. He wasn't excited about Davis' proposal.

"Really unnecessary'&lt;

"It's really unnecessary because a lot of students already do volunteer work as a part of their classes," Neder said, "and with the insane amount of requirements we already have, it's like one more thing that makes it more difficult to get out of here in time."

In Maryland, the first state to mandate community service in all high schools, thousands of students last year were forced to attend hastily prepared community events after officials realized one-third of their students had failed to fulfill the requirement.

In response to complaints from students who believe they are being turned into society's slaves, the Ayn Rand Institute offers an internship that allows them to fulfill the requirement by working against volunteerism.

The courts have looked favorably on public service, despite complaints from groups such as the Ayn Rand Institute. At least one unsuccessful lawsuit from a libertarian group contended that mandatory public service violates the 13th Amendment, which outlawed slavery.

Despite the scattered complaints, the trend toward community work is increasing. A nationwide study by the Educational Research Service published in 1994 found that 36 percent of public schools either required or offered volunteer service, and the figure is certainly higher now.

The movement gained force in the 1990s, in part because the Clinton administration started the AmeriCorps national service program and persuaded Congress to put $215 million into state efforts to tie volunteerism to education.

Cornerstone of CSU-Monterey&lt;

At Cal State Monterey Bay, which opened its doors in late 1995, community service has been built into the curriculum from the start, said spokeswoman Holly White. The university, which is located in Seaside, requires two semesters of community service for all students.

As sophomores, students take a class called

"Participating in Multicultural Environments." It includes a weekly class meeting and four hours of work a week with a community group. Students take their second community service class in their junior or senior year, she said.

"A lot of students who know what they want to do when they graduate take a placement that is similar to what they might do in their chosen field," White said. "My student assistant, who is interested in the psychology of teaching, is working with disabled students this year to get hands-on experience."

White said some students consider the community requirement an extra headache when they enroll. But that feeling quickly vanishes, she said.

"What students see first and foremost is that they are learning every time they go out into the community," she said.

For some students, the placements turn into full-time jobs at graduation, she said.

Terry Lightfoot, a spokesman for the UC system, said students have many opportunities to volunteer for community service through activities organized by fraternities, sororities, and student clubs and organizations.

"Community service is a key part of UC's mission and is undertaken in a variety of ways by students and programs," Lightfoot said. "It's not a foreign concept." &lt;